Meanwhile in Virginia...
Hi, this is my first diary. I'm a 31 year-old native son of Virginia (who now lives in Kentucky), so, naturally, I was following the VA governor's race with considerable interest. Congratulations, by the way, to Virginia for (however narrowly) not making a huge mistake last night.
You didn't need to be a Nostradumbass to predict that Cooch was going to screw the pooch, nor was clairvoyance necessary to correctly predict the main direction in which the gnarled, trembling fingers of Republican blame were going to point as the dust settled: Libertarian candidate Robert Sarvis. Sure enough, one need only look at any discussion thread on any conservative site on any article about the Cooch's defeat to see plenty of examples of teabaggers blaming the Libertarian for splitting the conservative vote. I mean, the alternative is accepting that the latest large-scale repudiation of the authoritarian Tea Party agenda is just confirming an established trend, but we all know that there's no room in the echo chamber for that kind of epiphany.
But, is that really how it happened?
There's no way to really tell just how many Virginia voters split tickets last night, or the nature of those splits, but while going over the results again, I noticed a little something that makes me wonder just which party was actually hurt by Robert Sarvis' just-enough-to-be-a-spoiler performance last night.
(numbers are from the Richmond Times-Dispatch)
McAuliffe (D) - 1,066,149 - 48%
Cuccinelli (R) - 1,010,929 - 45%
Sarvis (L) - 145,762 - 7%
Much closer than almost everybody thought, right? Certainly enough for many conservatives to feel almost like they actually won something, to feel like radical rightwing policy is actually something that almost squeaked out the upset. While this no doubt makes a whole lot of losers feel something akin to a moral victory, it conveniently ignores the Lt. Governor's race, which featured a man we all know and love for his willingness to actually be more or less completely honest about the Tea Party agenda: E. W. Jackson. Since, as the cons insist, the Cooch's unexpectedly strong showing is proof that the message resonates with Virginia voters, right?
Northam (D) - 1,208,783 - 55%
Jackson (R) - 976,227 - 45%
Ouch. So much for that. Of course, we still have the very much undecided AG race between the two Marks, but I want to go over these two sets of numbers. They reveal some interesting stuff:
2,222,480 votes were cast for Governor.
2,185,010 votes were cast for Lt. Governor.
2,199,817 votes were cast for Atty. General.
Predictably, the top ticket got the most attention, but not by a great deal more than the Lt. Gov. (-37,470) or Atty. Gen. (-22,663). But, the differential which is more stark is that which separates votes for McAuliffe from votes for Ralph Northam. While ticket-splitting is to be expected in a purple state like Virginia, it's interesting to see just how the ticket actually split. Cuccinelli received 34,702 more votes than Jackson, and there's nothing surprising about the top ticket outperforming the next tier down when the candidates aren't very different. Was Northam that much different than McAuliffe, though? You might wonder, because the Lieutenant Governor-elect not only outperformed the top of the Democratic ticket, but he outperformed by a whopping 142,634 votes. We all knew that McAuliffe was far from an optimal candidate, and we also all knew that some of the statements which fell out of E. W. Jackson's face-sewer could occasionally make the Cooch seem almost like a rational adult on rare occasion, but is that enough to account for a nearly 13.5% drop in Democratic votes?
Whence the Libertarian? Robert Sarvis' policies really straddle the line. In one neat package, you have a guy who establishes his bona fides with right-leaning libertarians by supporting school vouchers, deregulation, tax cuts and the Second Amendment, along with opposition to the ACA. But, to go through his list of issues, that is about as far as the right-leaning stuff goes. Sarvis also holds a lot of opinions which make him absolute anathema to the theocrative authoritarians of the Tea Party: he's staunchly pro-choice, favors legalization of marijuana and the decriminalization of harder drugs, is welcoming of immigrants, wants reform in the death penalty process (so that fewer, rather than more, people end up on it), wishes to curtail corporate environmental abuse, and is a strong proponent of marriage equality. Really, how many supporters of Cuccinelli's policies would abandon him for a platform which seeks to recognize immigrants and LGBT as human beings on an equal plane with everybody else? Please.
Now, I'm not going to suggest that every vote for Robert Sarvis was one fewer vote for Terry McAuliffe, but unless there really were more than 142,000 Democratic voters who defied the typical low-turnout scenario yet simply didn't bother casting a vote for governor, then it goes without saying which side suffered the most from his presence. The margin between the number of votes Sarvis got and the number McAuliffe didn't get from Northam voters?
3,128.
Considering the fact that Sarvis' social agenda is almost diametrically opposed to the 19th century draconian nightmare vision of Ken Cuccinelli, and that Cuccinelli's platform focused much more on his social views rather than the economic views on which he has considerable overlap with Sarvis, I submit that the story conservatives are telling themselves today, the story that Robert Sarvis cost Cuccinelli the governor's seat, is just another example of math you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better. I think the actual math demonstrates very clearly that our less-than-stellar Democratic candidate was the one from which Sarvis took the lion's share of his votes.
The Cooch outperformed a running mate who faced no ticket-splitting challenger in terms of raw votes (but by less than 1%, and this doesn't account for naturally lower interest in the second tier of the ticket), but they both finished with the same percentage of the popular vote (45%), precisely what you would expect from a party which makes mortal enemies of anybody who dares vote against any candidate from the far-right fringe.
Ralph Northam outperformed McAuliffe by almost precisely the same number of votes which makes up the total of Robert Sarvis' performance, and it's clear that Sarvis is much closer to a career conservadem like McAuliffe than the far-right kookery of the Cooch. Remember, we heard a lot about how a significant percentage of voters who were voting for McAuliffe were actually voting against Cuccinelli. Casting your ballot for the libertarian achieves the same result.
So, when you listen to the inexplicable gloating of the regressive element over their victory of losing by three percent instead of losing by seven to twelve percent, and when you hear them ruminate of a victory stolen from them by an intransigent libertarian spoiler, just remember that the numbers strongly suggest that the Virginia GOP just won one of the most hollow moral victories in recent American political history. As satisfying as it would have been to see the Democratic margin of victory predicted by many pollsters, just remember that McAuliffe beat a scion of the Tea Party head-to-head with a split ticket that probably hurt the Dems much more than it hurt the GOP in a state that only recently gained legitimate battleground status.